William Larsen

I listen to WOWO in the morning on the way to work. I also listen to it in the afternoon (Pat White). It never ceases to amaze me how bad some information presented can be. A caller called in complaining about the bailout and suggested that the $25 billion being proposed for the big three be given to American families. She identified it as 335 million families and each one would get $325,000 each. First off, there are 300 million Americans and about 95 million households. Roughly speaking for every $1 billion, each household would get $10. Therefore, a $25 Billion bailout directed instead of the big three, but directed towards American households would bet roughly $250 with an exact amount of $263.16.

The point I am attempting to make is that simple mathematics of both the caller and the host of the show did not catch the blatant error being made. I have heard over the past month numerous obvious errors pertaining to simple math. In order to provide some assistance to those who needs some remedial math help, see the table below. In rough terms for each $1 Billion it costs the taxpayer $3 per individual American or $10.50 per household. So when someone it spitting out numbers about providing it to the individual or a household, one can roughly gage the accuracy of the callers values using these two values multiplied by the bailout amount.

Taxpayer Funded Bailout	Total Population	Individual Amount	Total US Households	Household Amount
$1,000,000,000	300,000,000	$ 3.33	95,000,000	$ 10.53
$25,000,000,000	300,000,000	$ 83.33	95,000,000	$ 263.16
$700,000,000,000	300,000,000	$2,333.33	95,000,000	$7,368.42